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Remote Control

This has to be a quick and dirty post as I have 5 minutes before I will be late leaving for a meeting, so pardon any typos as this is my brain talking.

Someone made a remark the other day “My father’s comment pushed every button he had installed” and I thought that’s a brilliant way to look at it. Some assembly required. Your “family of origin”, to use the vernacular, assembles you with all the magic buttons that they can later push to control you. Talk about an elegant system.

I have removed my self from immediate family for the most part, or they have removed themselves from me, so the distance is too great for them to access my buttons. However. As we do not exist in human silos, I was thinking of the ways that I let (or get) my buttons pushed by strangers, acquaintances and friends and suddenly remembered this odd movie I saw a while back.

My husband and I often watch Indi movies, international movies, documentaries and so on. Partly a carry over from his film school days, but mostly because we have quirky tastes. The movie – the title escapes me – was about a sex therapist who was in her words, “pre-orgasmic”, meaning she had never experienced an orgasm, and she counseled couples about improving their sex lives. Various story lines crissed and crossed to good or ill effect, but in one section the sex therapist she hired (an S&M dominatrix of course) gave her a remote control vibrator for her to wear and her husband to control to try and solve her problem.

No sooner do they enter the sex club where the experiment is to take place, when the husband is distracted and loses the remote control in the couch cushions. The woman is endlessly being zapped by strangers sitting down, getting up and doing various other athletic things on the couch. Hijinks ensue.

This made me think that there are probably an infinite number of remote control units floating in the world with my name on them. Without all the hijinks of course. Shocks and zaps from unexpected corners to all those buttons that have been so carefully disconnected from the family issued remote controls mean its time to get out the tool box and find the wire cutters.